And the winner is Stripes

I've been working on a hobby project of mine and I needed an extremely light weight Java based web framework for the presentation part, and I chose Stripes (link: www.stripesframework.org).

And boy am I glad I found Stripes. Stripes is darn simple, has an absolute minimal learning curve (I got started in about 15 mins) and I have yet to find a thing I dislike (other than the fact it is not a component based framework, but than again, this was one of the reasons why I chose Stripes in the first place).

Let me give you an example - I hold an absolute minimal amount of data in the session (most is bound to the request as there is no knowing when a request will hit another cluster instance) but when a validation error occurs, Stripes will by default forward to the previous page. This is mighty fine if it wasnt for the fact than that page expected a specific object to be bound to that request, so most of my renderings failed. "Well - Stripes authors might have anticipated this" I thought and what do you know - they did - you can simply implement an interface (ValidationErrorHandler) and your ActionBean can do whatever before Stripes does the actual forward and I simply bound the necessary data (again) and vupti - page displayed correctly.

AND there are no crappy XML configuration files - URL bindings are set using annotations and can include parameters (which will then be set as parameter on request) and much much more (I hope :-) )